At what level of factual saturation does the fictitiousness of the "researched" novel start becoming irrelevant? I started asking myself this midway through Richard Price's 
Clockers, and I'd be very surprised to hear anyone come up with a definitive answer.
A couple of weeks ago I realized with a start that I'd not read any fiction in months, instead picking up new non-fiction title after new-nonfiction title. I decided to remedy that with a copy of Clockers that had been sitting on my shelf since spring, and the realization quickly dawned on me that I'd inadvertently probably chosen the best book for the transition from the real to the imagined.
Price wrote the introduction to David Simon's Homicide, which has been the book of the month in the Current Events forum, and in it he describes how the two men bonded over shared experiences when promoting their books. Since then, they've gone on to work together on Simon's series The Wire, which featured a handful of colorful scenes taken from Clockers. (Probably the funniest is when the Barksdale gang drug slingers and their girlfriends meet the narcotics squad "knockos" Herc and Carver coming out of a movie theater with their girlfriends and share one of those awkward moments — like seeing a high school teacher out of the classroom, or those old Warner Brothers cartoons where the wolf and the sheepdog both clock in at the same time, civilly talking with each other before starting their daily game of life and death.) What's startling to read, from Price's introduction and from both books, is how little separates them.
Simon spent one year at a desk in a homicide squad room and going out on countless calls. Price spent years shading a New Jersey detective who he described as his Virgil, leading him into the crime underworld much as the poet's shade led Dante through the various levels of hell. Simon came at the subject as a reporter who'd spent years on the police beat. Price grew up in the Bronx projects and was even battling his own substance abuse as his Virgil took him deeper into the police confrontation of the drug trade. Their two books are so similar in tone and sympathies that a little tweaking here or there could make them identical.
Take a few polemical passages out of Simon's or add a few to Price's. Strip down Simon's narrative from multiple cases and expand the coverage of a few murders, or thin out Price's "big case" and add more incidental homicides. What you'd have left would be the same fantastic dialogue and almost classically russian sense of character detail that allows the omniscient narrator to move closer to the heart of a person without seeming intrusive. In other words, Simon's non-fiction gets the music of the streets and the nuance of character so right that it could be a novel, and Price's novel is so richly authentic that you could hand it to police cadets as a primer.
Price delivers that authenticity via the dyad of Detective Rocco Klein and a "clocker" (drug slinger) named Strike and how these avatars of Justice and Injustice move inexorably together over a drug-related murder. Rocco's trying to reconcile the life of a detective with his newfound fatherhood, and the process of explaining police work to a method actor opens himself to questions about what his work means to himself and to the people he ostensibly protects from crime. Meanwhile, Strike is moving up in the drug trade, and his pangs of conscience, gnawing stomach and fear of violence force himself to confront that he probably has too much heart for the inevitable coldness he'll have to adopt to succeed. As the murder threatens to destroy Strike's family, both Strike and Rocco begin to try to find ways to split the difference between how their jobs are done and what ought to be done. A nagging need for some purer justice pushes Rocco to try to undermine a certain conviction from a false confession, just as Strike thinks there could be a way to stay in the game while selling out some portion of it to save his family.
Strike is guilty. He's a criminal. But he's also the moral core of the book, an unknown tether to conscience that pulls Rocco away from the failing-hearted cynicism of his lectures to the method actor and back to the vital concern he used to feel on his job — as well as to a sense that his status as a father is still just an empty gesture. In a descriptive stroke that could've been taken from Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, Strike's being eaten at the core by doubt and revulsion at what he is becoming, giving a physical expression of nausea that neatly parallels Rocco's more philosophical condition.
These moral agonies and lucid descriptions of decaying streets would be almost too much to bear if Price didn't deliver snapping sometimes musical dialogue that's a joy to read and pretty much impossible to repeat here without setting off a dozen screaming message-board alerts about profane content. Pick up any random page and scan until you see quotation marks and then read for five minutes, and you'll have an excellent example of the rich range of street dialects Price reproduces, part comic, part aggressive, this posturing banter where everyone has to get respect, even the guys with the badges and authority.
This isn't to say that Clockers is a detective story that happens to be fun and serious. Rather the opposite: it's a serious book that hooks you with fun dialogue and the crime framework. But the detective story is, as with an episode of Columbo, sort of beside the point. What resonates isn't the AH-HA! moment but all the moments leading up and in between: the disses and the subtle nods, the struggle for a neighborhood and for a sense of doing right by it. Change some names, and these could be scenes from the Baltimore of Simon's Homicide. If someone hadn't told you this particular story wasn't real, you probably would never know.
A couple of weeks ago I realized with a start that I'd not read any fiction in months, instead picking up new non-fiction title after new-nonfiction title. I decided to remedy that with a copy of Clockers that had been sitting on my shelf since spring, and the realization quickly dawned on me that I'd inadvertently probably chosen the best book for the transition from the real to the imagined.
Price wrote the introduction to David Simon's Homicide, which has been the book of the month in the Current Events forum, and in it he describes how the two men bonded over shared experiences when promoting their books. Since then, they've gone on to work together on Simon's series The Wire, which featured a handful of colorful scenes taken from Clockers. (Probably the funniest is when the Barksdale gang drug slingers and their girlfriends meet the narcotics squad "knockos" Herc and Carver coming out of a movie theater with their girlfriends and share one of those awkward moments — like seeing a high school teacher out of the classroom, or those old Warner Brothers cartoons where the wolf and the sheepdog both clock in at the same time, civilly talking with each other before starting their daily game of life and death.) What's startling to read, from Price's introduction and from both books, is how little separates them.
Simon spent one year at a desk in a homicide squad room and going out on countless calls. Price spent years shading a New Jersey detective who he described as his Virgil, leading him into the crime underworld much as the poet's shade led Dante through the various levels of hell. Simon came at the subject as a reporter who'd spent years on the police beat. Price grew up in the Bronx projects and was even battling his own substance abuse as his Virgil took him deeper into the police confrontation of the drug trade. Their two books are so similar in tone and sympathies that a little tweaking here or there could make them identical.
Take a few polemical passages out of Simon's or add a few to Price's. Strip down Simon's narrative from multiple cases and expand the coverage of a few murders, or thin out Price's "big case" and add more incidental homicides. What you'd have left would be the same fantastic dialogue and almost classically russian sense of character detail that allows the omniscient narrator to move closer to the heart of a person without seeming intrusive. In other words, Simon's non-fiction gets the music of the streets and the nuance of character so right that it could be a novel, and Price's novel is so richly authentic that you could hand it to police cadets as a primer.
Price delivers that authenticity via the dyad of Detective Rocco Klein and a "clocker" (drug slinger) named Strike and how these avatars of Justice and Injustice move inexorably together over a drug-related murder. Rocco's trying to reconcile the life of a detective with his newfound fatherhood, and the process of explaining police work to a method actor opens himself to questions about what his work means to himself and to the people he ostensibly protects from crime. Meanwhile, Strike is moving up in the drug trade, and his pangs of conscience, gnawing stomach and fear of violence force himself to confront that he probably has too much heart for the inevitable coldness he'll have to adopt to succeed. As the murder threatens to destroy Strike's family, both Strike and Rocco begin to try to find ways to split the difference between how their jobs are done and what ought to be done. A nagging need for some purer justice pushes Rocco to try to undermine a certain conviction from a false confession, just as Strike thinks there could be a way to stay in the game while selling out some portion of it to save his family.
Strike is guilty. He's a criminal. But he's also the moral core of the book, an unknown tether to conscience that pulls Rocco away from the failing-hearted cynicism of his lectures to the method actor and back to the vital concern he used to feel on his job — as well as to a sense that his status as a father is still just an empty gesture. In a descriptive stroke that could've been taken from Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky, Strike's being eaten at the core by doubt and revulsion at what he is becoming, giving a physical expression of nausea that neatly parallels Rocco's more philosophical condition.
These moral agonies and lucid descriptions of decaying streets would be almost too much to bear if Price didn't deliver snapping sometimes musical dialogue that's a joy to read and pretty much impossible to repeat here without setting off a dozen screaming message-board alerts about profane content. Pick up any random page and scan until you see quotation marks and then read for five minutes, and you'll have an excellent example of the rich range of street dialects Price reproduces, part comic, part aggressive, this posturing banter where everyone has to get respect, even the guys with the badges and authority.
This isn't to say that Clockers is a detective story that happens to be fun and serious. Rather the opposite: it's a serious book that hooks you with fun dialogue and the crime framework. But the detective story is, as with an episode of Columbo, sort of beside the point. What resonates isn't the AH-HA! moment but all the moments leading up and in between: the disses and the subtle nods, the struggle for a neighborhood and for a sense of doing right by it. Change some names, and these could be scenes from the Baltimore of Simon's Homicide. If someone hadn't told you this particular story wasn't real, you probably would never know.
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